Time out boosts brains

Date: August 02 2010

New research shows some types of optimistic daydreaming are productive, improve IQ and inspire resolve, writes Ainslie MacGibbon.

The young Albert Einstein was more likely to have been the child staring out of the window in class than the one bent over his books. Einstein, like many great scientists, thinkers and intellectuals, was also a documented daydreamer in the classroom. But what if he had gone to school today? Would he have had the chance to muse on the big scientific questions, or would he have been put on a drug such as Ritalin to aid his concentration?

Today, children's days tend to be highly structured and daydreaming in school is seen as time wasting and indicative of poor self-control. It is a problem which needs to be labelled and ''fixed'', sometimes medically.

Although this approach is enabling many students to focus, there are fears we may also be dulling creativity - even greatness - in the process. There is mounting research that shows the idle, ''resting'' mind is doing everything but resting, perhaps even making us smarter.

Dr Jerome Singer, an emeritus professor of Psychology at Yale University, pioneered research into daydreaming during the 1960s. He says younger children verbalise all their thoughts but by the time they reach school, they are conditioned to keep some thoughts to themselves, and so they enter a private world of daydreaming.

Dr Singer says his research shows that daydreaming can have many constructive uses, including self-regulation and helping children to plan ahead.

He says while daydreaming in children might reflect the fact that a child is not comprehending material and is seeking distraction, ''we have also found that many children who are creative and imaginative may find that they can avoid some of the boring or repetition of ordinary classroom work by drifting into playful fantasies without missing the material being presented''.

''Teachers should be sensitive to individual differences and accept the fact that some children may indeed be capable of a form of multitasking, " he says.

It is widely held that Einstein began his theory of relativity while daydreaming about riding or running alongside a sunbeam to the edge of the universe. This was just after he was expelled from school (coinciding with his choice to drop out) because he had started to rebel against prescriptive teaching and rote learning.

The first Australian-born woman to win a Nobel prize, the molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn, was also a daydreamer.

She told an audience of children earlier this year at Canberra's National Science and Technology centre, Questacon, that daydreaming had contributed to her success.

"I think you need time to daydream, to let your imagination take you where it can … Just do that some of the time, because I've noticed [that] among the creative, successful scientists who've really advanced things, that was a part of their life," she said.

Professor Blackburn joked that parents and teachers may be less impressed by her advice.

Dr Singer believes schools could benefit by allowing brief periods where children can relax into their own thoughts or draw, or write things down in a free and imaginative way. "Daydreaming is important because it is a critical way in which human beings move beyond their immediate environment to create vicarious virtual realities that allow them to try out alternative personalities and interests."

He laments there may be missed opportunities for such constructive activity in the brain in the digital age, when children spend up to 80 per cent of their free time watching television. Dr Singer's theories on daydreaming are now seen as being ahead of their time. It's only during the past decade that neuroscience and brain imaging have added weight to his ideas.

Research shows we spend between 15 and 50 per cent of our day daydreaming. Dr Marcus Raichle, a neurologist at Washington University in St Louis School of Medicine, discovered a network in the brain that is now known as the default network (the brain's default position when there is no outside stimulus). Dr Raichle's research shows several structures become unusually active in the brain when it is thought to be resting or idle, and he concludes that daydreaming is the mind's default mode. It has since been established that this network is weakened in people with autism or Alzheimer's.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US last year, Dr Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychology at the University of California, found "neural recruitment in both default [resting] and executive network [goal-directed] regions was strongest when subjects were unaware of their own mind wandering …

''The observed parallel recruitment of executive and default network regions - two brain systems that so far have been assumed to work in opposition - suggests that mind wandering may evoke a unique mental state that may allow otherwise opposing networks to work in co-operation."

So it is in these periods of daydreaming or "zoning out" when we are unaware that we have drifted off that some real problem-solving takes place.

In Scientific American earlier this year, Dr Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli and Dr John Gabrieli, investigators at The Gabrieli Lab (Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience) at MIT, cited research on the link between the performance of the brain when it is resting, monitored in a brain scanner, and intelligence.

The article says: "For the first time, functional measures of the resting brain are providing new insights into network properties of the brain that are associated with IQ scores. In essence, they suggest that in smart people, distant areas of the brain communicate with each other more robustly than in less smart people."

Dr Tim Hawkes, the headmaster of The Kings School, Parramatta, recognises what he describes as "good daydreaming" and "bad daydreaming" in students. "Good daydreaming is when the mind is working on information, and for that information to lead students on journeys of imagination, unlocking creativity. Bad daydreaming is when students are thinking about an insult directed at them on Facebook. If a student was consistently daydreaming I would want to find out which type of daydreaming it is."

Dr Hawkes believes we need to encourage less to be said in our classrooms for more learning to happen, "many students are lost in a sea of words - a student in the junior school can only digest shorter sentences and about five minutes of listening to directives from a teacher. In the senior school, that increases to 15 minutes before needing a break. A significant per cent of what we teach today will be out of date in eight years anyway, so we need minds well-formed not minds well-stuffed. Critical thinkers. Knowledge acquisition shouldn't be the aim these days when you can press a button and find the answer."

To nurture such critical thinking, Dr Hawkes says open-ended questions such as "If orange was a sound, what sound would it be?" or "If there was a fourth type of rock, what would it be?" will help form minds. He also garners inspiration from the Greeks, "you can choreograph wonder - you have to create a sense of wonder''.

''The Greeks only had one faculty - but it was a beauty - the faculty of wonder. The problem with teaching today is that we have an overcrowded national curriculum and narrow testing that leads to pre-prepared answers. Times of reflection are of utmost importance to foster life-long thinkers, life-long dreamers, life-long wonderers."

Dr Andrew Martin, an educational psychologist and professor at the University of Sydney, says letting your mind wander in optimistic ways, but a little more grounded in your future, can lead to good outcomes. ''It directs a child's thoughts and behaviours to relevant activities needed to realise that daydream; … it energises and inspires children; and it can enhance persistence towards a goal, especially when the chips are down …,'' Dr Martin says.

"When a teacher is about to relay information they say is important, it's best to hold off, but the hour-long train trip to and from school is perhaps a very nice time to explore these daydreams."

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